This past year, my 12±year-old dachshund has begun demand barking/growling like crazy. She picked up the habit a couple years ago when we’d be in a crowd, and people had stopped paying attention to her, so she’d give one loud demanding bark and everyone would coo “oh, she just wants attention, how precious” and pet her and so Barking Works. We ignored it at home, but it was reinforced so often in public that she keeps doing it.
Now she uses it for attention/food/boredom at home, and constantly. She decides when she wants to get up in the morning (between 6-7), barks/growls until we get up and take her out, then will sleep a little while longer, then decides that it’s time to get up and start the day, so she lies in her bed and growls. If you put her downstairs, she lies at the bottom of the stairs and barks, one bark every fifteen seconds (like clockwork). If we sit down to eat and it becomes clear she’s not getting any, she demands to go outside right that second.
While she does have some incontinence issues, and drinks a lot/pees a lot in general, she mostly just wants to go outside and eat poop, because apparently that’s fun and delicious. Coprophagia pills don’t work. She barks for someone to come get her and carry her into the next room if we leave; she barks for people to come back downstairs if we go upstairs; she growls to get off the couch; she growls to get on the couch…
This morning she started the growling around 4:30 a.m. (lying in her bed, not dancing at the door); I finally took her outside at 5, where she peed quickly and then waddled off to eat some poop, and I had to go outside in the snow in a nightgown to grab her because I can’t even yell as the next house is literally 4’ away. Then back upstairs, she fell asleep and was snoring within seconds as I seethed and shivered in the bed.
I can ignore it mostly during the day, except that occasionally she’ll then pee on the floor or her bed if she’s ignored and she actually has any pee in her at the time. She also has endless capacity for barking; I’ve heard her do the fifteen-second bark for over an hour when I was upstairs, waiting for her to be quiet so I could come back down. At night/early morning, I can sometimes sleep through the growling, but my husband absolutely can’t and will give up and take her out because he has to get up early.
Any thoughts? She is otherwise the sweetest, best dog in the world (other than the puncture wounds in my finger from her choking on a chew yesterday, as seen in another thread), and I really hate that I get so angry at her for this. I know I won’t have her for a whole lot longer and I don’t want us both to be cranky at each other instead of having our usual mommy/dachshund bond.
It’s very sad, but he is otherwise content as long as he stays in his two rooms, sleeping on the dog bed.